


Footprints

by aMAXiMINalist



Series: Post-Empire: Kanan and Hera's Domestic Serenity [4]
Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: F/M, The Force Awakens referenced, post-Empire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-14
Updated: 2016-12-14
Packaged: 2018-09-02 13:48:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8670070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aMAXiMINalist/pseuds/aMAXiMINalist
Summary: He answered the little one the best he could.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fizzygingr](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fizzygingr/gifts), [pepoluan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pepoluan/gifts).



> Based on a Tumblr drabble. 
> 
> This does have a spiritual continuity with a previous fanfiction ["Jedi Do Cry."](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7585390)
> 
> I've researched that some blind parents trace their children's movements by having bells tied in their clothing or shoes. So I incorporated it here.

He was about five arm-lengths away from the murmurs. Hera was light-years away in the stars, scheduled for a homecoming another day.

He shook the ball to stir a deep jingle. It was a gift from Cham.

He swayed his hands and let go, the ball slipping from his fingers, the _piff_ of drifting and the pattering rumble of the dirt.

 _Sweep, sweep, cling, cling._  The baby slapped down in irritated _thumps_ on the dirt because he had done it again. He hadn't aimed the ball to her, but next to her, to the expanse beyond her.

Her test had restarted.

_Cling, cling._

The baby's bells, clacked around her right fist, emitted an airy register.

The bells drifted in incremental mites further and further. The baby had opted to crawl away, the flicks of sand sifting with every pat.

"Cihes, Cihes, get it." Then heavier _clanks_. Those were his firstborn's bells. She had been sitting down ten feet away, an observer of her sister's test.

"Kaleb, hush." When Kaleb ordered "get it," she meant "call it to you," her way of being critical. When she was only a few months old, she guided toys to her, commanding it to drift into her waiting grip without the physical action of crawling. 

On the other hand, the baby dragged herself to her toys or cried for them to be brought to her if she could not reach far enough.

But today, his ears could discern the subversion of the normal push-pull motion, the ball was being yanked against logical psychics of its direction, accompanied by the padding of sand. The baby leveraged herself up. She began patting at the ball like petting a loth-cat before releasing the ball to the side. 

"She went to it but she did it."

"I know. I heard."

"She passed, daddy."

But it wouldn't have mattered if she "didn't pass." ("Failure" would not ever apply to this game.) She was powerful in the Force, but more resistant, preferring manual action. On the other hand, her elder sister would command objects to her whims.

The baby gnawed at her bell, securely, tied to her wrist, exhausted of the game, chiming, "Bab-bababa" between metallic chews. "Bah-Bah," gibberish likely translated to "daddy, daddy." The bell chimed in her waving arms, her signal she had her quota of ball-exercises for today. _Cling. Cling. Cling._ She had invented her language through the bells. If her chimes emitted a consistently austere rhythm, she meant business.

"Cihes." He could feel her, the twerk of her head, acknowledging his call.

He descended on his belly, crawled toward her on his knees and elbows, in a mock-military drag, a throwback to drills in the Jedi dojo. If only he had Hera's affectionate snickers over the image of her husband on all fours, mirroring their baby, an adult man reverting to infancy movement.

He "stared" at the baby, flashing her a playful grin, before extending his palm to the pad of her cheek. Her cheekbones responsive to her daddy's caress, she emitted a shriek of delight. She rewarded him with a fluttery pat on his lips, combing her fingers through the flurry of his beard. Kaleb had reported distant relatives and in-laws had bemoaned, "A tragedy he can't see his baby girls." But he was more than fine, hearing their voices and the bells and a flood of elation whenever he heard their laughter. He drew halos around her cheek in fluttery tickles. That charmed the angles in the muscles--the dimples popping into her jaw--into forming a smile. She glowed as one warm beacon in the Force, though she rarely smiled, at least in comparison to Kaleb. ("This one got her daddy's stoicism," Hera told Ezra.)

Then Kaleb's bells--the _clanks_ \--got closer. She emulated his military crawling, following her daddy's motion.

"Cihes a Jedi." Her finger brushed his as she patted her sister's cheek.

"She's got the Force. She uses the Force, sometimes. But she isn't one." She'll be ready for the tale of Ahsoka Tano. There could be the possibility Kaleb might change her mind. 

"I'm one."

"Not yet." She hadn't ever met the Skywalker yet. She hadn't even met Skywalker's students. She hadn't even met Skywalker's apprentice.

He swept up the baby and kicked Cham's gift away, letting the toy roll into an afterthought, a decresendoing jingle, somewhere out of his senses. His firstborn had always been trusted with retrieving it. He scooped the infant to his chest and waggled a finger at her, dodging her eager grips, a mini-game of coordination. He'll let her win so she can carcass his hands. She was like Kaleb, with her unblemished infant's hands rubbing his calloused palm, alleviating his scars.

"Take a walk with me, Kaleb." He gave his firstborn the namesake, to make peace with hearing the remnants of that name and pay homage to the boy Jedi.

He liked Ryloth for its expanse of land. There was a safe amount of isolation in the outskirts, where families and children could play. He always walked in the direction of the sunbeams.

"I'll be a Master like you," Kaleb mused. What she talking about being a teacher or the Master rank?

"Well, you gotta work for that." He still was. Even though he didn't quite know how to do it without the supervision of the Council. Perhaps the Force might decide that for him.

"Daddy, are Jedi Masters perfect?"

“You mean teachers or those of Master rank?”

“Mhm.” She seemed ambivalent toward either definition. He had to include himself in the answer.

“Well, of course not.” The answer applied to both meanings. “I was Ezra’s master. And if you ask him, mistakes were made. Mistakes I’ve made. Sadly, sometimes an apprentice pays for a master’s mistakes.”

That would be Ezra’s story to tell. Maybe Ezra would divulge to her tales of Master Kanan Jarrus’s errors, errors that didn’t even occur to Master Kanan himself, who already chided himself many times for Ezra’s training, for the blunders. “Did your master make mistakes?”

“Of course. All masters do. Even ones like Master Yoda and Master Kenobi, I’m sure.” He tried to recount Billaba's mistakes, hoping to excavate a funny story, a throwback to her. Then he wondered what regrets she had, aside from vocal remorses: _"Young Caleb, I regret you had to be involved in war at such as young age."_

He already told his girl how he didn’t agree with the old masters avoidance of attachments. 

“Why do Jedi follow masters?” 

“Well," he muttered, tickling the baby's cheek and tracing the stretched dimples, "because traditionally, they knew better… not everything… but usually better. They’re older, they tend to have seen more in life. They make mistakes, not because they want to, but they learn from them. They survive their mistakes. So they get good at having young apprentices avoid their mistakes.”

She matched his tranquil pace; their rhythm synced. She could reach for his hand if both hands weren't occupied with rocking the baby.

"But apprentices still make mistakes." And he wondered what stories Ezra had told her about himself.

"Yes." Though rocking the baby, he released one hand and lingered it at his side to give Kaleb the option to take it. "That's why the master must watch the apprentice. To anticipate their mistakes."

He waved his loose fingers, a signal he wanted her hand.

"What if the master doesn't catch it in time?"

A sigh.

"Sometimes the apprentice is on their own. Sometimes they have to figure it out." Caleb, you remember how cold you were in your drenched robes, behind the dumpster on Kaller?

The warmth of her fingers slipped beneath his.

She did the work. He not only traced her progress through her performance and Hera's testimony ("She's been at it for three hours a day"). He traced it in her hands. Her skin had toughened from training, no longer immaculately pebbly smooth like Cihes's hands, hardened from hours of exercises, Form III routines. Kaleb earned her own callouses while he was gone.

“What does the apprentice do if the master is wrong?” Her fingers stroked the rugged bumps on his hand.

“Then the apprentice shows the master the way. Like Ezra has for me. Masters can get lost too.”

In an inspired, spontaneous burst of hyperactive impulse so commonplace in children, she flew off. Her departure liberated his fingers in immediate coldness, in spite of the Ryloth heat. He returned his free hand to the baby to compensate for the cold.

The scurrying of little feet and _clanks_ swept his ears, her form drifting further from the radar of his senses, the bells fading into the distance, a song from afar. Even though he trusted she would remain within the radius of his senses and earshot for today, he fancied that one day, even while sensing her beacon, he'll miss the jingles.

Still, he was right behind her. 

The murmurs of the infant in his ear, seemingly whispering an indecipherable secret, he followed his little girl. His feet melded into the impression of her footprints beneath his steady steps. He took his time to catch up with the song.


End file.
